A lawyer, who works with security companies, has slated the Security Industry Authority In-house Licensing Review - Outcome Report - May 2009 which concluded that “there is no clearly defined or substantiated risk to public protection to be addressed and that SIA were unable to make a case which would justify extending the SIA’s remit to include licensing of in-house guards.” Paul Housego, of Beers LLP, sets out his observations exclusively for Infologue.com: “The Hansard report said that there would be a review “of all the arrangements” in three years time. There has not been suc...

A few weeks ago, we learned that the regulator decided that there was insufficient evidence to justify the licensing of in-house security personnel, writes The Security Institute Chairman, Mike Bluestone. The SIA’s mantra is that there is no risk to public safety from that decision. Public safety is of course a paramount objective, but so too is the raising of standards. How can it be right that in both theory and practice, in the UK in 2009, a fully trained and licensed and CRB checked contract guarding team could be managed and supervised by in-house security staff who may hold criminal co...

Keeping a business on stream during a recession means considering the basics of effective risk management and providing innovative solutions to the challenges of the economic environment.  It’s not about providing more officers or more cameras but about taking a ‘smarter’ approach to the way these are deployed and the effectiveness of the mitigating response,” says Peter Jones, the Chief Operating Officer of Reliance Security Services Limited, writing exclusively for the Infologue.com Leadership series. Recession asks big questions of any business manager, most of which revolve aroun...

A much heralded step improvement for the guarding industry was to be the introduction of the ACS.  Much hope was placed by many on what the ACS might achieve.  There is no doubt that the ACS has contributed to raising standards and I expect most would acknowledge that many of the smaller companies have raised their game a notch or two to meet the ACS criteria.  However, an unintended consequence of the ACS is that it has made it even easier than before for the end-user to purchase security on price alone. The customer may, quite reasonably, think that all ACS companies are the same and thu...

You may remember some time back I wrote a blog on info4security concerning the formidable topic of Business Bingo. If you recall, I listed some of the mind-bendingly ludicrous phrases PR and marketing types dream up to make themselves sound important. ‘Going forward’… ‘Grab the low-hanging fruit’… ‘Shoot the nearest crocodile to the boat…’ That kind of thing. I heard a new one the other week, in fact, along the lines of: “We need to re-purpose the content” (which, in plain English, means ‘edit’). Excuse me while I shake my head in mock wonderment and genuine disbelief...

The Infologue.com Newsmaker behind the acquisition of Temple Security was the Axis CEO Jonathan Levine.   Levine told Infologue.com “Clients work with Axis because of the quality of our delivery but we have not previously been able to extend that offering outside of London and the South East because we did not have the infrastructure to cope,” he says. “The merger with Temple Security not only gives us this network overnight, but it also has the added attraction of an electronic security business that brings further capability to the service we can offer.”  Levine, a Yorkshireman g...

We believe that the Government should let UK plc have a greater input into helping protect our Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).  Protecting the UK’s CNI is “good business”: it is good for staff; it is good for customers; it is good for shareholders; and in the long run it is good for the UK.  Critical infrastructure in the UK is largely owned and operated by the private sector: it is illogical that its future protection should be left entirely in the hands of the state. With global security threats continuing to grow in today’s society the protection of Britain’s critical n...